Churches & Cathedrals
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A church supposedly built wherever a Welsh warlord found a white ox with a black spot on its forehead, containing the oldest fabric of any cathedral in Wales — and a genuinely unusual two-level structure most visitors don’t expect.
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The last Cistercian abbey ever founded in Wales, named after a cross-topped pillar that was already four centuries old when the monks arrived — and once legendary for ale that reportedly flowed like a river.
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A Norman priory founded in 1093, home to the original regimental colours carried at Rorke’s Drift, sitting inside the only walled cathedral close in Wales — and yet one of Britain’s youngest cathedrals, only 100 years old.
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Deliberately built in a hollow so Viking raiders couldn’t spot it from the sea, in Britain’s smallest city, where two pilgrimages here were once said to count as one to Rome.
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A cathedral founded by a 6th-century Welsh saint, nearly destroyed by a wartime landmine, and rebuilt around a controversial 16-foot aluminium Christ — now one of Cardiff’s most popular concert venues too.
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Every English and British monarch since 1066 has been crowned inside Westminster Abbey, and its floors and walls hold the tombs of kings, scientists and poets alike — a working church first, a visitor attraction second, which is exactly why so many people arrive unsure whether they can actually go inside.
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Christopher Wren’s dome has watched over London since 1710, survived a direct hit during the Blitz that made it the single most famous image of wartime Britain, and hosted everything from Nelson’s funeral to a royal wedding watched by 750 million people.
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England’s oldest cathedral has survived Viking raids, a devastating fire, an archbishop’s assassination, centuries of pilgrimage, the Reformation, and the Luftwaffe — and its stones still carry the carved names of the pilgrims who came to see all of it happen.
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A Wren steeple, a bombed-out nave, and fifty years of ivy — one of the City’s most photographed ruins costs nothing to visit.